Yes. There IS a "Recourse" to DRM
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
A Wired article about the end of the Microsoft Store's books section laments the fact that many users took notes in their ebooks, and lost those along with their licensed copies of the various works:
Contrary to the above, I can think of at least three recourses. (1) Hard copies and marginalia, written by hand, (2) notes taken on a pad or device that isn't the ebook reader, and (3) learning, as I did, how to transfer your notes to your own computer. (For Amazon, you need only go here, then copy-and-paste your notes to a file in the format of your choosing.) All of these, of course, require taking the potentially transitory nature of a digital license into account ahead of time. If you want your notes to be "within" the licensed copy and you're considering a digital platform that does not allow you to export your own notes, take your business elsewhere if that's important enough. (Before I decided to go with Amazon, I made sure I'd be able to export any notes.)Other companies have pulled a similar trick in smaller doses. Amazon, overcome by a fit of irony in 2009, memorably vanished copies of George Orwell's 1984 from Kindles. The year before that, Walmart shut down its own ill-fated MP3 store, at first suggesting customers burn their purchases onto CDs to salvage them before offering a download solution. But this is not a tactical strike. There is no backup plan... And because of digital rights management -- the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell -- you have no recourse. Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or markups. But that provides only the coldest comfort. [bold added, link omitted]
Image by Perfecto Capucine, via Unsplash, license.
The Microsoft Store closing is no indictment of DRM or of ebooks: It is a cautionary tale for those of us who want to take full advantage of a new technology.
-- CAV
3 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write: "A Wired article about the end of the Microsoft Store's books section laments the fact that many users took notes in their ebooks, and lost those along with their licensed copies of the various works:"
My knee-jerk response is, thank goodness! Have you seen the boneheaded stuff people write in the margins of books?
More seriously, I used to work at a used bookstore back in grad school, so for well on near a decade I got to see marginalia by people trying to sell us books. Sometimes you just want to blink, look at the potential seller with slight disdain, and slowly raise an eyebrow just to psych them out. Of course, now that paper books are going the way of the dodo, they fill the margins of the Internet with their scrawlings. (Some even post that stuff in the comment sections of blogs! Heh.)
Occasionally you do get the entertaining treatises blasting away at treatises, like the instance where a hardcore Dominionist tried to sell us a copy of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man with full annotations in the margins giving Biblical references for every theological error Paine committed with a healthy dollop of salty abuse slathered on top of it, and when we didn't buy it he gave it to us for free since, as he put it, "I have to cleanse my life of everything tainted." Alas, the owner of the bookstore, who has a sense of humor the equal of mine own, snagged the discard for himself.
No, what you usually get is a copy of David Landes's The Unbound Prometheus whose previous owner just wrote, "What an ***hole!" every other page, or the innumerate anti-relativist who vandalized a physics textbook with faulty math and worse pseudo-philosophy, or the beginning Objectivist who derived alternative history from first principles so as to engage in a running battle with the author of a history of Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century (you might remember me showing you that copy a couple of decades ago--alas, I think it got lost in a move), or far more than one Marxist disagreeing volubly with anything and everything not in the program.
What's funny is that MS would have paid an extra twenty five smackers for that....
True. I imagine that if they made N payments, they saw a net irremedial loss of 0.98*N*25 USD under the best of circumstances.
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